On the earlier years, Google celebrated their birthday on the 7th of September. For the past few years though, they moved the date to September 27. On the occasion of Google Birthday as on 7th Sept. New
Google Logo, also called a
Google Doodle was introduce on Google Homepage. In this logo we are able to chase balls of different color.
On September 7, 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporationâ's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology. Already Google.com, still in beta, was answering 10,000 search queries each day. The press began to take notice of the upstart website with the relevant search results, and articles extolling Google appeared in USA TODAY and Le Monde. That December, PC Magazine named Google one of its Top 100 Web Sites and Search Engines for 1998. Google was moving up in the world.
Now as the web search engine
Google celebrates its
12th birthday, it is hard to imagine life online without it. It has become such an indispensable tool that we don't just search for something any more, we "google" it, as recognised by the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. What many people don't realise is that Google's rise to become one of the most successful search engines on the web today is due to the mathematical algorithm
PageRank, devised by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the founders of Google. This algorithm not only decides which webpages match your search criteria (which all search engines do), but also which are more important and returns these at the top of the results.
PageRank decides how important a page is by staging a popularity contest with each page on the web voting for all the other pages it links to. The algorithm constructs a huge matrix with a column representing each web page. The entries of the column corresponding to a page P indicate which other pages P links to. The page P passes on a proportion of its own importance to those pages it links to, and its own importance is calculated by adding up all the contributions made by the other pages linking to it. This all sounds pretty circular, but in fact calculating this importance vector is relatively straight-forward using linear algebra techniques, despite the fact that the matrix involved has over 25 billion rows and columns. (You can read more in The
amazing librarian, a runner-up in the Plus
new writers award 2008.)
The maths behind Google highlights the relevance of maths in our daily lives and shows the vital role it has to play in industries, especially the information sector. But it must also be the most lucrative piece of maths in history, as this mathematical advance is directly responsible for much of Google's success and so the company's $4 billion dollar profit in 2007.
But what do you give the organisation that has everything (well, the whole web anyway)? What Google wants for its birthday are ideas that can change the world by helping as many people as possible. They have launched
Project 10^100, and are asking everyone to submit their life-changing ideas by 20 October 2008, and they will put the best 100 ideas up for public vote. The vote will determine the 20 finalists, and 5 of these will be chosen to share the $10 million funding that Google hopes will make these ideas happen.
So, not only has maths changes our lives by opening up the world wide web through Google's algorithm, the money this maths has made Google might just make the world a better place too.
Once Again...Happy Birthday Google..!!
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